A Partial List of Women in New Media Arts and Design

A Partial List of Women in New Media Arts and Design

Some Context About This Page

Below are some (woefully incomplete) lists of prominent women working in various modes of new-media arts, activism, and design. This page was drafted in Fall 2015 as a resource for our students to quickly familiarize themselves with the work of interesting creators; as a result, we readily admit that there is a very significant bias here in favor of (1) artists who happen to have media-rich websites (i.e. with lots of easily consumed documentation videos), and (2) who work computationally, i.e. by writing software—since computer programming for the arts was the specific topic of our class. Many very significant voices have undoubtedly been overlooked.

This page is not intended as an authoritative public resource (unlike, say, Wikipedia’s list of Women Artists or List of New Media Artists); this page is simply a list we provided to our students so that they could be better informed when writing their weekly “Looking Outwards” assignments, which we noticed with dismay had been skewing towards male artists. That said, any omissions are wholly unintentional, and suggestions are very welcome. Notices, corrections, etc. should be directed to golan at andrew.cmu.edu or @golan.

R. Lozano-Hemmer, who kindly contributed some of the names below, remarked: “It’s awkward to make a specific list extracted from the gender spectrum. Also many of the people listed here have nothing in common in terms of their practice, field, approach, etc. So this list is [perhaps most useful for the] purpose of helping avoid all-male panels, publications or shows in media art”. (Precisely: such as our students’ writing assignments.) In compiling this list, we feel it is important to acknowledge the understandable ambivalence some may feel: for while visibility can be good, being singled out and listed based on gender is also sometimes a complicated position to be in.

Thus—for making such abundantly awesome and inspiring work, but secondarily for (hopefully) tolerating its inclusion in this awkward compilation—we would like to thank the women who have unknowingly or willingly contributed their name to this effort to inform and educate. In the words of one anonymous correspondent:

In an ideal world, this list will continue to remain ‘partial’, incomplete and very soon obsolete as the names and practices that would normally be listed here multiply at a speed that cannot possibly be kept up with—there will no longer need to be a list as these individuals are sparkling so hard into the future that no one can miss them.

This page is dedicated to the public domain, under a CC-0 license; all copyrights are waived.

Electronic and Computer Music

The list below of women working in electronic musics is extremely abbreviated. For more names, we highly recommend you check out female:pressure, an international network of over 1700 female artists from 66 countries in the wider fields of electronic music & arts, which is “a collective effort to demonstrate women and their use of technology in music and media production.”

Yet More Women in New Media Arts and Design

List-making is an inexhaustible task, and we’re deeply grateful to others online who discovered this page and have helped repair out blind-spots and fill in some gaps. The following names were kindly contributed by R. Lozano-Hemmer. He identifies numerous women who are especially influential pioneers in new media arts and criticism.